


I'm Afraid Pillowfort Is Doomed: Part 2 - Admin Policies

by Elf (Elfwreck)



Series: Pillowfort Thoughts [3]
Category: No Fandom
Genre: From Dreamwidth, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction, Social Media, pillowfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-15
Updated: 2019-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:35:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24137470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elfwreck/pseuds/Elf
Summary: Continued from previous Pillowfort-Doomed thoughts. Pillowfort's TOS changes with the whims of the owner(s) and allows arbitrary enforcement; the users have no idea where the boundaries are nor what criteria is going to be used for judgment. Also, their sudden move from .io to .social because of the content restrictions at the former indicates that they don't pay attention to written rules. This does not bode well for a site that wants to host controversial content.
Series: Pillowfort Thoughts [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1741846
Kudos: 1





	I'm Afraid Pillowfort Is Doomed: Part 2 - Admin Policies

This is a sequel to [Part 1 - Money](https://elf.dreamwidth.org/801993.html); sometime later, I'll write Part 3 - User Conflicts.

I don't _want_ [Pillowfort](http://pillowfort.io) to be doomed. I want new social media options, and I love some of PF's features. But... I watched Yahoo shut down Yahoo Clubs. I have an Imzy t-shirt. I funded WritScrib. They're [not alone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_websites) in failing to figure out how to make "give people a place to hang out online" profitable.

**ADMINISTRATION**

Pillowfort faces two major problems with administration: lack of transparency and ambiguous policies. Neither of those would make the site nonviable (plenty of very large social platforms have both), but they'll combine with the other problems (money, user conflicts) and will make it very, very hard for Pillowfort to achieve the critical mass of active users it needs to survive beyond the initial "hey it's new and shiny everyone come try this" phase.

Both the lack of communication with users and uncertainty about the policies lead to _lack of trust_. Right now, users are assuming that things are mostly fine. A few people are unhappy over changes in policies, and a few are unhappy with some of the dev judgment calls, but most people agree that nothing's been shocking or convinced them they couldn't tolerate the site. However, every new surprise, every new "wtf was that, staff???" reaction, will increase the paranoia and suspicion.

Users who don't trust the staff (1) won't pay for features, even if they want them (because a staff that arbitrarily changes policies, can decide "oh hey your 1-year subscription is now a 3-month subscription; sorry about that"), and (2) won't tell their friends about the site, even if they're actively using it. That latter is the killer: if what they're saying isn't, "hey come join me!" but "well, there's some great artists there, but I don't know how long they'll be allowed to post," PF is not going to gain the new users it needs to survive the attrition rate.

 **1\. Features**  
We need to know what's planned, and what the timelines are. If the plans are entirely nebulous and there are no timelines, _we need to know that_. We need to know which of the "features we're planning" are actually being worked on, which are being bugtested, and which have been set back to "eh, we want that, but it's not working right now."

If the users don't know what features are planned, they get annoyed that their favorite of the someday-planned features hasn't shown up yet. When some other feature gets released first, they feel betrayed. Pillowfort is far too young to survive a wave of users who feel betrayed. (AFAIK, nobody feels betrayed yet. The [planned features](https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/19) list is updated as they go along, so there's no easy list of what's been done and what's sticking around. Most people are still caught up in the beta-testing joy.)

Features tie heavily to the money issues - we all know that better features cost more, and most people are willing to pay more for the features they care about. What we don't know, is how much which features cost, and how they'll be bundled together. I'd pay more for better filtering and search options; I'm not interested in paying more for hi-res image hosting. Plenty of other people will pay for better hosting options, but don't care about how many communities an account can manage. Hitting the right balance so people will pay for the features they want, and not mind getting features they don't care about, is tricky--but first, they need to know what features they'll have. They don't, yet.

So they're letting people get used to a certain communication style, get used to communities and cliques*, and eventually they'll roll out Bonus Stuff that some people like, some people are indifferent to, and some people hate.

*Cliques are not a bad thing on their own. People need packbondy social groups.

(Will you be able to pay extra to have a Promoted Blog, where its posts show up in the dashboard of all people who don't have its keywords blocked?)

What's missing from the planned feature list: a list of "we will NOT have this feature." PF staff avoids telling people, "that thing you want, we're not going to do it." Sometimes the "no" is for technical reasons: PF doesn't have the bandwidth capacity to compete with YouTube; you are never going to be able to upload unlimited videos at Pillowfort. And they may feel it's pointless to state that directly. What they haven't said: will you be able to upload some videos? Some audio? Or will those be embed-only?  
Not listed on the Planned Features page, even though plenty of people have asked for them:

  * Customized blog pages
  * Search functions (several types) - search a single blog, search by date, search for communities with particular tags or users
  * Sort communities alphabetically and by most recent activity 
  * Show my communities on my profile
  * Add comments while reblogging (probably not going to happen) 
  * Show only original posts, no reblogs, in feed
  * Sticky posts for journals or communities



and so on. This is not my wishlist, and I know a lot of these won't happen because the way the code is already written makes them very difficult. Some are common requests; some are less so. PF is dodging any of the negative press involved in saying something is never going to be available - they might even believe that "someday, we might get around to any of those, so it's premature to say they're off the table!"

They're currently still doing [bugfixes](https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/565183) \- they've just cleared up one where some kinds of image posts scrambled the order of the images. Yay for that. But we don't know what's next, or what's after that, and we don't know which features would be almost impossible to make, vs which ones are just a matter of enough user interest to justify the time they'd take.

Oh, they had a User Survey last month. I didn't find out about it until it was over, because it's not like they emailed users. Maybe they only wanted feedback from people using the site currently - which means that those of us who got accounts and drifted away, are going to continue to think that, at best, PF doesn't meet our needs. At worst, we wind up feeling alienated and unwanted, and we tell our friends not to bother with it because it's not interested in being the kind of site we want.

 **2\. Policies and Enforcement**  
I've talked [about the TOS](https://elf.dreamwidth.org/780639.html) before. It's gotten worse since then - they've decided on their Icky Sexy Images policy. (My term, not theirs. They call it the [Policy on Explicit Artwork & Underage Characters](https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/232244).)  
The short version: "As of this statement, Pillowfort will not allow explicit visual art of characters that appear to be underage."

Note that "appear to be." It's important.

Going through the rest of the policy description, and skipping over the parts that are pontifications, or explanations of their thoughts and feelings, or reassurances that this is not the End of Pillowfort, the actual clarifications include:

  * Broadly, if your characters are close to 18 and could plausibly or arguably be of age based on appearance, that will be allowed.
  * sexual depictions of characters in later stages of adolescence may broadly be considered ‘safe.’
  * explicit or sexual art of a character that appears to be physically pre-pubescent or barely pubescent (i.e. not plausibly or arguably of age, or even close to it) will be prohibited. 
  * when it comes to video or pictures of pornography of real individuals, if it is legal to disseminate under US law and you aren't intentionally spamming, it's fine. 



So... no pervy [chan](https://fanlore.org/wiki/Chan) artwork. Fair enough. It's going to annoy the people who signed up for PF hoping it'd give them the community that Tumblr used to have, but hey, AO3 was founded to give those people a place to share their works. (They'll have to host them elsewhere, though.)

However, this isn't, "no explicit pics of underage characters." It's "nobody who LOOKS underage;" not stated is "to the devs and our abuse team, who'll be using standards we won't disclose to decide what that is." Anime character ages are often [misconstrued by Western audiences](https://www.ranker.com/list/anime-characters-who-dont-look-their-age/anna-lindwasser), and sometimes people insist that any chibi artwork depicts children.

On the other hand, PF allows that art involving "late adolescents" is okay, but since the standard is "looks adult," maybe that's "characters who the viewer might think are over 18 are okay, even if anyone who knows the fandom knows that these are 16-year-olds, as long as the artist doesn't clarify their ages." So... Harry/Draco art might be allowed, as long as the background didn't establish that it happened while they were attending Hogwarts?

The important thing here is not whether this is censorship, or whether it's an important CYA policy for legal reasons, or whether Pillowfort is allowed to use its moral judgment about what people can post.

The important thing is: This is a BAD POLICY. It's poorly phrased, and there's no objective standard. A person who has artwork of characters of indeterminate age (say, Robin and Arsenal, or Harry and Draco), can't look to this policy to figure out whether or not it's okay to post those pictures.

This looks like "we're hoping that leaving it vague will create a [chilling effect](https://www.thefire.org/chilling-effect/) that discourages content we don't want, but aren't willing to actually make a policy against." And that's a terrible approach for a social website - especially one that needs a large, active userbase to build enough inertia to survive past its first couple of years.  
\---  
This has gotten longer than I'd expected, and I don't want to put another 500-1000 words on enforcement right here. So, there might be a Part 2b, or I might skip that and fold those ideas into part 3, User Conflict. The short version: enforcement has been as opaque as the planning, which will lead to distrust. There is no easy method to contact staff to report problems (separate from reporting bugs, or asking feature questions). There is no publicly known process for how to deal with troublesome people.

As they say on the internet, "I can see no way this could possibly go wrong."


End file.
